1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to speech recognition technology and in particular to isolating and processing common dialog cues without affecting a dialog application for which speech input is intended.
2. Introduction
In conventional speech dialog systems, an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) module may receive speech input from a user and may perform speech recognition of the speech input. The recognized speech may then be passed as text to a dialog application. The dialog application may analyze the input received from the ASR module to determine an action to take based on the input. If the action involves generating speech for outputting to the user such as, for example, prompts for additional user input, the dialog application may generate text and may pass the text to a text-to-speech (TTS) module, which may generate speech from the text for a user to hear.
When a new dialog application is designed, various conditions, such as, for example, error conditions, as well as other conditions, must be considered. Thus, the dialog application must be designed and implemented such that it can recover from the error conditions as well as properly handle the other conditions. Currently, design and implementation of dialog applications, which may perform complex error recovery processing as well as other processing, may be very complicated.
It would be desirable to be able to perform certain types of functions, such as recovery from error conditions, as well as other desirable functions, outside of the dialog application. By isolating the certain types of functions from the dialog application, dialog application design and implementation would become easier because the designers and implementers could focus their efforts on the application-specific functions without concern for the design or implementation of error recovery as well as the other desirable functions.